Forget about flashy graphics, compelling content, or amazing usability. The #1 thing your website must have is web analytics.  Why? Well, without Analytics how are you ever going to know how visitors find your site? Or what they are doing once they are there? Analytics provides you the insights you need to make your website better.

If you don’t have analytics set up, I’ll show you how to do it in less than 5 minutes. We’re busy people after all, right? So let’s get started…

  1. Head over to Google Analytics and sign up for an account. You’ll need to have a Gmail account, so if you don’t already,create one.

  2. Once signed in click the Sign Up button
  3. Enter your websites URL address, ex: www.MyWebsite.Com

  4. Hit Continue and enter your First and Last Name, then select your Country and hit Continue
  5. Accept the terms and agreement, which you probably won’t bother to read (who does)
  6. Click Create Account

Congratulations. If you did it right, you’ll be staring at a bit of HTML code like this:

Now the trick is getting that HTML into your websites code. In most cases, you’ll just want to drop that code right before the </body> tag at the end of each of each web page you want to track (Which should be all of them). If you have trouble doing this, leave a comment below for help.

If you use WordPress, like I do, you have it real easy. Just install the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin, activate, and add the UA-XXXXXXXX-X code Google gave you into the plugin. It will take care of the rest.

Once your done, sit back and relax. It will take Google about a day to recognize the code and start tracking data. In a future post I’ll show you how to gain some useful insights from Analytics.

Hope this helps get you up and running.